I listened to this during my commute. I'm not very good at listening to audio books so maybe I would have enjoyed this more if I read it. My main issue was the syntax. It seems Banville will always pick a 5 syllable rarely used word over anything else. Since I was listening I'd get stuck at a word and say it over again in my mind...thus missing out on the story. I have a feeling that if I read it these words would also stop me and jolt me from the story. Not everyone has to be Earnest Hemingway, but I felt that he enjoyed flipping through the dictionary and finding ways to work in obscure words. As for the plot, I thought the best parts dealt with Max as he experienced his wife Anne battle cancer. I kept zoning out when he was at the seashore in present time. The Chloe/Miles/Grace plot was interesting, but I kept thinking "what pre teen boy really thinks like this?" Similar to the word choice the characterization and memories of the boy didn't seem to fit. ( )

i finally gave up on this book after 117 pages. The characters just didn't have any life or breath to them. I know the theme is grief, but I just couldn't get any feelings from this book and didn't understand it. For a Booker prize winner I was really disappointed in this book. ( )

Age, loss, and rememberances. Wonderful language.

A disappointment, this. I loved the opening, Banville has a wonderful style and it was hugely enjoyable to get lost in it. However, as the book progressed it didn't gain the fascinating characters or themes to go with that style - nothing really bit and my interest waned, particularly in the second half. ( )

I was skeptical of critics' descriptions of this book, but I really did encounter a Nabokovian feeling in it. Spectacular! ( )

As others have indicated, the prose in this slim novel is stunning, lush, and elegant. I would like to have been able to identify more with the main character. The juxtaposition of his childhood memories of summer with the Graces and his present-day end-of-life issues and grief over his wife's death are poignant; however, he seemed stilted, self-conscious, even posturing, as he related his feelings. As wonderfully as it is written, I have to connect with the character(s) in a book to give it a higher rating. ( )

What does it mean to be able to write so gorgeously -- to be apparently incapable of writing normally, like an ordinary novelist, to perennially attract clichés like "lush," "beautiful," "mesmerizing," virtuouso" -- and yet be hopelessly, permanently incapable of giving a novel drive, impetus, force, tension, forward movement: and to know that you never can, and to make a virtue of that fault, constructing books that seem to require lassitude, torpor, mulling and meditation, and then, perhaps because of your fame and the insulation it produces, to be unaware that readers can see that ploy for what it is, and not even take pleasure in its desperation? ( )

I love Banville's lush prose. Banville is excellent at writing people and events into empty settings. It is as though you see a deserted scene which delicately becomes inhabited by whispers that turn into conversations and ethereal whisps of smoke that coalesce into human bodies. Banville invents the world as a corporeal dream. The Sea is a novel carried along by plot a little more than usual but is none the worse for that. Well worth it's Booker Prize, read and catch your breathe in sighs. ( )

Lush beyond almost anything else I've read ... and occasionally (perhaps unintentionally?) hilarious in its character portrayals -- i.e., the Colonel! Densely atmospheric and immersive. I don't remember the last time I had to consult a dictionary so often for a novel! I want to read much more of John Banville's work ... The Sea is my first ... it won't be my last. ( )

In the immortal words of that great piece of 90s film-making, 10 Things I Hate About You, is it possible to just be whelmed? There were some beautiful passages in The Sea, and as a portrait of the savage unromanticism of the grieving process, I found that it worked very well. And yet at times I found it very self-indulgent, and Banville's admitted talent with crafting a good sentence—some of his imagery is stunning—doesn't mean that he's not capable of also turning out some rather torpid prose. I think it would have worked much better for me if he hadn't tried to introduce an actual plot towards the end of the novel—it made things hinge on some rather Dickensian coincidences and a little too much melodrama. The realism with which Banville depicted Max's grief for his wife should not, to me, have been tainted by that faint ridiculousness ( )

This book is beautifully written but it just didn't do it for me. I suspect that the main problem for me is that the main character is so disconnected from everything that I felt the same way and just didn't care. ( )

I wanted the language and imagery of this novel to carry me away much more than it actually did. The narrator, Max, is very detached, despite the fact that the novel supposedly details his grief over the death of his wife, and his first brush with death during his adolescence. For such a compact novel, it still moved very slowly, and did not pack the emotional punch I was expecting. Some nice writing, but missed thel mark for me. ( )

Following the death of his wife, Max returns to 'Ballyless', a childhood family holiday destination with many memories attached.

Somehow, I never got carried away by this. John Banville writes very convincingly with the voice of a man who is slowly coming to pieces, but I actually had far more sympathy for his long suffering daughter than for him. That said, the way in which Banville subtly depicts the completely un-self-aware Max using his own voice is very clever. ( )

Liked it more as it progressed. Hard to get into at first. Good descriptions of marriage and wife dying. Main characters not very nice. ( )

The Sea is a slim book. The final, single-sentence paragraph closes full stop on page 195. Slim, but not brief. Within its covers is an entire world, a world of one man’s memories of two deaths—one at the beginning of his life and the other in his old age. The book takes the form of a sort of memoir written by Max Morden, as he weaves the events leading up to the childhood tragedy into the recent tragedy of his wife’s year long ordeal with cancer and her final demise, one emotively interpreting the other. Though Max’s thoughts seem to wander haphazardly through his memories, the book is actually very tightly focused. The wandering done is between a few particular places, between a few particular times, with a few particular people, and the entire story orbits around his grief and his questions of self and other.

Max’s narrative is, ultimately, about himself and his understanding of his character, his personality, his limitations, his loss. Because of this, there are only a few character portraits to develop. This is no Dickens or Dostoevsky. This is a single consciousness surrounded by the bare essential of “others”. Indeed, the others who reside in Max’s present are mere ghosts compared to the presence of the cast of his memory. But even those remembered ones are far off, unknowable, untouchable. They are gods—he names them so in the very first sentence of the book. They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. Max is the only person we ever really come to know, and that only so far as he allows.

Max, we learn, is a bit of a dilettante. Ostensibly an intellectual writer on art, the aging man has been frittering away his time playing at writing a study on the artist Pierre Bonnard—“A very great painter, in my estimation, about whom, as I long ago came to realise, I have nothing of any originality to say.” He is a man who perhaps had great dreams—ever striving to put behind him the embarrassment of his low brow upbringing—but he has long since realize that his is “free, fatally free, of what might be called the curse of perpetuance.” His work ends. It will not survive long beyond his death—what of him will last? Nothing.

Max is painfully aware of his own mediocrity and detests it. He is not the great man he would be. His loves were no great loves. His desires were not sublime. In him passion and zeal were only masks of anxiety. He is—dreadful to himself—bourgeois. He is not particularly likable, though I would argue he is no worse than most of us. He is not idealized—Banville is clear about this, that he finds the superhuman heros of fiction uninteresting. Max Morden is like the rest of us, and therefore while not pretty, his life and thoughts are relevant. They offer us an opportunity to peer into the dark spaces within, to shine some brief light on the pitch black of our closely guarded inner selves. And that quality characterizes the book as a whole. This is not a book that transports us away from the realities of our life—it instead offers us the space, the opportunity, to go inward, to see ourselves as we are, in weakness and failing. That is its genius.

The Sea does not offer a final, comforting affirmation. It does not condescend to teach us by way of some tidy moral couched in beautiful prose. It is a portrait of a very common sort of man in a state of grief towards the end of his life. Max Morden is revealed to us without judgment—The Sea gives color, tone, and texture to the man and his ruminations about his life. In this way it is painterly—as if to point it out, Max makes frequent reference to paintings, particularly those of Bonnard. But where Bonnard idealized his subjects, Banville contrasts the idealized subject to the subject in context, bringing greater contrast and poignancy to the reality behind the painting.

Banville handles all of this weightiness masterfully. In other hands such honesty could become a bludgeon that effectively beats the reader into darkness of spirit. But Banville’s excellent imagery, the beauty of his lines lifts the book up. It is like a sad song sung beautifully, and in that glimpse of beauty there is life and the possibility of hope. The Sea.

excerpted from my blog post, I would not swim again... ( )

What a fantastic writer John Banville is. Not sure if I completely appreciate the subject matter, but the depth of the author is not only evident in his mastery of words, but also in his taste in music and art. Everything works meticulously in this novel and forms a masterpiece of a stunning picture.

With a writing style and a particular ability to observe details not unlike Ian McEwan, John Banville's work has become something that I look forward to reading with much interest. ( )

Banville's captivating writing style leads the way into a personal history of loving and grieving, two stories at opposite ends of a life. Banville's main character, Max Morden, ponders how well he's known anyone and what has been relevant in his relationships--he is struggling, during this hard time, to describe the eternal substance of his past relationships, what feelings he's taken away, which memories he will cherish forever.

Banville gives Morden's perceptions and vulnerabilities a well-developed history as the narrative recalls the circumstances of Morden's dismal childhood. There was his strange early friendship with a girl from a different class and then the sudden loss of that one joy, the disappearance of his father and subsequent economic and emotional turmoil of his teenaged years with his mother, then his relationship with Anna, his wife, and then her death. And at last, there is his relationship with his daugher, Claire, who is trying very hard to be a relevant character in her father's life.

Morden does not magically recover at the end of the book, but rather enters another phase of his life, as he continues to cope with the way things are now and begins to sort out the "what now" question. Banville has taken on a very difficult subject and made it appealingly readable.

John Banville writes a touching story with elegant prose about a man who loses his foothold on life in The Sea. Suffering from the death of his wife Anna, Max Morden retreats to a familiar home of his youth, owned by the Grace family, now run as a boarding house, in a sea side town. The story goes back and forth in time as Max remembers the well to do family, their twins Chloe and Myles, and his adult life with Anna.

As a boy, Max is infatuated with the Grace family who seem to live a charmed life, and develops a crush first on Mrs. Grace, then on Chloe. The youthful threesome, pal around the seaside town seeing life as adolescents sometimes do, not fully understanding circumstances, and making a decision that ends in tragedy. Alternately, Max thinks about his life with Anna, the way they met, fell in love, married, lived life and ultimately loses to cancer.

I would not have picked this book on my own; I read it for a book club that meets at the library, and liked it. It would be great to read it a second time to pick up on terms/words that I was not familiar with. After reading briefs about other books Banville has written, I see commonalities to The Sea, such as being English, widowed, cultured, single mothers, lodgers, older men returning to boyhood haunts, and confrontation of disturbing memories.

This was a thoughtful read where the beginning depicts a man's loss of his wife. In his grief and his uncomfortable aloneness he travels back to The Sea. We then have three parallel narratives that tell of his new experience in this boarding house by the sea, of his memory of this same house when he was an early teen, and of his last months with his wife as they faced the news of her condition. He goes to the Sea of his childhood because “being here is just a way of not being anywhere" as he pursues the "delicate business of being the survivor". He also goes back to try and understand an event that happened in his youth; much like A Separate Peace where a single act determines some meaningful consequences. Interestingly, Banville is also the writer Ben Black, who evidently writes very plot oriented mysteries. This book is very reflective and the writing requires careful attention to the detail - probably more similes than I have ever read in a single novel. The novel won the Booker Prize in 2005. ( )

Vaguely incestuous twins from a decadent rich family, lost youth and love, blah blah blah... yawn.

The strength of this book is in its writing. I agree with various reviews; the prose is luminous and hauntingly beautiful. However my overall reaction to the book while I was reading it fluctuated; including responses such as brilliant, annoying, absorbing, self-indulgent, lyrical, thoughtful, over the top, and others.
There is very little present day plot, with most of the book being Max's memories of the distant past (as a boy during that memorable summer) and the recent past (during his wife's terminal illness). These are seamlessly juxtaposed with each other and the present day events. There are some worthwhile thoughts and comments on bereavement and the nature of self. ( )

Initially this novel drew me in with its rich prose and methodical pace. In fact, the Sea's style and tone reminded me at first of Marilyn Robinson's Gilead, which I loved. Both novels follow an elderly man as he contemplates the choices he has made throughout his life and considering the impact of those decisions on his life. However unlike Gilead, which uses rich language to demonstrate the complexity of the character's feelings towards his relationships, the Sea lacks strong character development and becomes increasingly tedious to read. The one thing I have applaud Banville for is creating a strong narrative structure. Although, I didn't really feel any tension in the stories of the narrator's childhood centering on the Grace's, I did appreciate the seamless juxtaposition between the memories of his wife's last days and his time with that family. I also liked that to deal with the loss of his wife he literally retreats to his past by moving to the seaside town where he spent his childhood summers with the Graces. I think we are suppose to believe that the character comes to terms with all the loss in his life by facing his past and returning to the Sea when in fact by the end I was personally just glad I didn't have to spend any more time wading through the prententious, torpid prose. ( )

Max Morden has just lost his wife to cancer. Instead of moving in with his daughter, he chooses to stay at a boarding home where he vacationed as a child. This novel uses Max to explore themes of memory, first love, and loss, since the plot is scarce and almost all of the story is told through short, half-remembered vignettes of the past.

I didn’t like this book very much, in all honesty. I picked it up because I did enjoy Eclipse when I read it in my literature class last fall and I thought that, since this novel won the Booker prize, it was probably worth reading. And so it is, in a very literary sense. Not much happens until the very end, when the fragments of story come together and the reader finally understands why Max has gone back to the sea. The ending did actually redeem it, in that sense, and made the novel much more powerful. In addition, Banville’s prose is truly beautiful and it’s a pleasure to revel in his turns of phrase.

There were plenty of things I didn’t like about it, however, mainly the self-indulgent, whiny narrator. I have little patience for people who are so concerned with themselves when someone they are supposed to love is dying of cancer, so obviously part of this is my own bias. Max doesn’t seem to care about anyone at all. Secondly, I would have preferred a little more motion in the plot before the end. It is a wonderful ending, but I would have liked at least something to pull me along and make the journey there of more substance than beautiful words on a page. Normally, I’m okay when nothing much happens because I love atmosphere, but somehow this book didn’t create enough of that for me.

Now, you don’t have to listen to me, as plenty of people have loved this book. And it is a worthy read, if you have a few hours just to focus on reading and nothing else. It just wasn’t what I wanted when I read it and I found myself disappointed overall.

http://chikune.com/blog/?p=177 ( )

I didn't enjoy this book as much as I thought I would. I was expecting something a little more direct, a la 'The Book of Evidence,' but 'The Sea' was very nebulous. I'm sure it was meant to be, but it didn't have enough else going for it to raise my opinion.

You will wear out your dictionary reading this book.

The book is still, it shouldn't be ignored, very pretty. Both in appearance and in content.

It seems like Banville set out to write a plotless novel, and in that sense he succeeded. I didn't end up caring about any of the characters very much. I didn't mind reading about them, but I didn't take positive or negative issue with any of their actions. The typeface was lovely. One guy had a lot of chest hair. Etc.

My prevailing feeling throughout the book was one of waiting for something interesting to happen. Which I'm sure is a fault of my 21st century attention-span-deprived brain, and not one of Banville's obliviousness to the makings of an arresting novel.

I guess it felt more like a soak in a hot tub than a voyage on the sea. Only needs one letter changed to be 'The Spa.' ( )

I didn't know what to expect with this book when I first picked it up. Some how I missed all the earlier buzz when it won the Booker Prize. That's not always a bad thing. I like to come to a book without hearing a great deal about it ahead of time. I can honestly say that I liked the book, and I understand why it won (although I don't remember which books it was up against). Banville is obviously a talented writer. Grief and memory are the two major themes of the book. Max Morden is the narrator who tells us the story of how he loses his wife to cancer. Following her death, he returns to a seaside cottage that he visited as a child to deal with his loss and the ghosts of something that happened long ago. The reader doesn't really know what it is that draws Max back to the beach until close to the end of the book. He introduces us to the Grace family, but at first I really couldn't figure out why he was telling us about them. It simply didn't seem relevant at the time. He just lost his wife for heaven's sake. Why should we care about the family he met as a boy on vacation? I won't say more about that because he does a nice job of answering all the questions for the reader as the book comes to a close.

I usually either like the narrator or hate the narrator. In this case, I seemed to have a fickle relationship with Max. At times, I felt extreme sympathy for him as he struggled to deal with his grief. However, at other times, I felt more like slapping him. I guess he was just being honest about his feelings. But, at times, I wanted to scream at him -- you're wife is the one dying of cancer! He seemed very needy and somewhat of a chauvinist. He even had some unkind things to say about his own daughter. I guess I may be being too hard on him. Everyone grieves differently, and none of us would hold up very well against criticism if the rest of the world could read our minds.

The book does give the reader a glimpse into what it would be like living with someone with a terminal illness and the aftermath of their death. A close family member went through this a couple years ago, and I could relate to some of the things that Max went through. Grief is a funny thing. It can make you feel as if you're losing your mind at times. Overall, I would recommend this book. I had a few quibbles, such as the narrator interrupting the story unnecessarily. However, this wasn't a big deal. Just know going in that this isn't a feel good book. ( )